Medical Microinstruments Inc. (MMI) says its robotics system has been used for the first microsurgical intracranial brain surgeries.
MMI’s Symani Surgical System was used by Dr. Adnan Siddiqui at Buffalo General Medical Center/Gates Vascular Institute to perform indirect bypass, encephaloduroarteriosynagiosis (EDAS) operations in three adult patients with Moyamoya disease, the device developer said.
Moyamoya disease is a rare condition that restricts blood flow through the carotid artery in the skull.
The surgeries were the first in a neurosurgical clinical trial sponsored by the Jacobs Institute, a nonprofit medical device innovation center led by Siddiqui as CEO. That trial is an early feasibility study approved by the FDA.
“This advancement to first-in-human application builds on our 2024 preclinical study at the Jacobs Institute which confirmed Symani’s potential in brain surgery,” MMI CEO Mark Toland said in a news release. “Dr. Siddiqui’s cases demonstrate how Symani delivers the precision required for the delicate, highly skilled maneuvers that neurosurgery demands — capabilities that facilitate and potentially even exceed what the human hands alone can achieve. This milestone represents meaningful progress toward expanding robotic microsurgery into one of the most technically challenging areas of patient care.”
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Siddiqui is also a University at Buffalo distinguished professor and vice chair in the Department of Neurosurgery at the State University of New York at Buffalo’s Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.
“This study represents so much more than foundational work for robotic brain surgery,” Siddiqui said in the release. “The early success of these first brain surface cases, and the ability to perform minute surgical moves on the pulsating brain, should make the world as excited as it makes me and my esteemed peers in the neurosurgery community as we explore more ways Symani can revolutionize brain surgery.”
Siddiqui will offer more details on these first-in-human procedures in the Hopkins Lecture at the Congress of Neurological Surgeons (CNS) 2025 Annual Meeting in Los Angeles on Oct. 14.
Medical Microinstruments’s Symani system won FDA de novo clearance for soft tissue manipulation to perform microsurgery in April 2024. The system does not have regulatory authorization for neurosurgical indications.
